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“... undemanding relationship with her erstwhile husband than of the ungovernable passion she felt for Robert. He rather relied on this passion keeping their marriage on more placid and companionable lines. When Tory worries about her son at boarding school, Bertram suggests they call the matron. ‘That “we” took a great burden from her. For so long she had ...”

“... than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing Wax and Charles Crichton’s Painted Boats were demonstratively appropriate, though Googie Withers dolled up like a Staffordshire figure in front of a spread of Kemp Town Georgian exerted rather more box office pull than ...”

“... humiliators rather than the humiliated, to ‘convert trauma into triumph’ (in the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller’s terms), to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control, the trauma of being a child into the false triumph of being an adult. The child as abject supplicant becomes the adult as arrogant sadist. In other words ...”

“... Other club members preferred less gruesome explanations for the playwright’s brilliance. Robert Folkestone Williams, later to write a trilogy of biographical novels about Shakespeare – Shakespeare and His Friends, The Youth of Shakespeare and The Secret Passion – reverts to a less elaborate version of the Ovid-goes-to-Stratford manner in ‘A ...”

“... some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... He served as the director of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos, reporting directly to Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, he returned to Cornell, but he remained active as a consultant to the nuclear weapons programme, as well as to the budding nuclear power industry. In 1947, Bethe was asked to tackle the problem of shielding for nuclear ...”

“... who have conventionally been regarded, with Suckling and Carew, as principal ‘Cavalier’ poets: Robert Herrick, who advised us to gather ye rosebuds while we may, and Richard Lovelace, the stone walls of whose incarceration by Parliament did not a prison make. But what is Stubbs’s account of Milton, the spokesman for regicide, doing in the book? Why do we ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”

“... another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm and shaking it roughly in ...”

“... civil-society theorists about the inevitability of the break-up of the Soviet empire in 1989, and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone warned of the dire consequences for the political culture of the United States of failing to nourish similar voluntary forms of civic participation. Kwon applauds the creation of an ‘ethical horizon of human solidarity beyond the ...”

“... which has cost the taxpayer nothing’. But what if it had been – oh, I don’t know . . . Robert Hughes, or Rolf Harris – sitting on a bed, looming over a naked 16-year-old girl, blowing the petals away from her mons veneris? Greer’s argument that modern society has forbidden women the pleasure of boys’ bodies is almost wrecked by the ...”

“... has been further refined and elegantly extended by one of the foremost economists of our time, Robert Solow, in his monograph An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability, published a little over a decade ago. Solow sees sustainability as the requirement that the next generation must be left with: ‘whatever it takes to achieve a standard of living at ...”

“... and escapes’ – the very things which, for good or evil, Evelyn Waugh and Peter Fleming and Robert Byron, not to mention Redmond O’Hanlon, assume to be the heart of travel writing. This leads us to the reflection that travel writing, or anyway the best sort, only pretends to be informative. The author, out of self-respect, and by mugging up or other ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”